


boy born at winter's height

by ilia



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Ghosts, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pining, Recovery, Written for Dimitri's birthday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:13:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28246728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilia/pseuds/ilia
Summary: The twentieth of the Ethereal Moon comes with a storm. Dimitri and Felix find ways to weather the years together—for better, and for worse.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 5
Kudos: 28





	boy born at winter's height

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this for Dimitri's birthday, and I'm only two days belated! Dimitri would forgive me. Felix would not.
> 
> My first Dimilix. Thank you for reading!

1170

The snow falls at a languid pace, and today for the first time in a month, the sun bursts through the clouds at full force. And it’s the sort of cold outside that catches on Dimitri’s lashes and grates along the sensitive inside his nostrils when he inhales, and he mustn’t be out for long, because his father will worry. But Prince Dimitri turns eight today. And that sort of thing comes with certain freedoms afforded.

His feet are swaddled in heavy boots of wolf’s fur and deerhide and the sunshine refracted across the grounds has his pale eyes tightening, but still he crunches across the snow with decision. Their guests from the east have come today. And while the elder of the two Fraldarius men might be settling in, Dimitri knows to find Felix in the snow.

Like a cat. Or perhaps a rather disobedient stray dog. Felix lingers outside no matter the weather, away from the crowds, sulking when he’s pulled into their midst at the behest of formality and musts and _it’s proper_ s, and Dimitri has come to find a predictability in his friend’s ventures. Soon, he’ll stumble across Felix if he walks in the wilds long enough. Or Felix will find him.

A snowball hurtles across an expanse and hits him square in the back, and Dimitri knows he’s found his mark. The little prince turns and Felix is there, enswathed in that ferocious Fraldarius blue. His hair, raven’s feathers, spills over his shoulders.

Dimitri smiles.

“Good throw,” he shouts to his friend.

“Easy to hit a target that wants to be found,” Felix cuts in return.

The cloudcover puts up a front against the sun’s determination. The light flickers and dims, and the sunblinded world is thrown into definition. At this spot in the grounds, the army of fir trees that protect the northern mountains come into view. The snows thicken; flakes catch on Dimitri’s lashes and land into Felix’s hair.

Perhaps it’s the proximity of their territories. Perhaps it’s the proximity of their fathers. But there are times where it’s just Felix and Dimitri, Dimitri and Felix, and even without the presence of their other friends, Dimitri enjoys the worlds they spin together in play. Now, too, there’s a tenderness in his throat as he looks towards Felix. His friend—his precious friend.

“Stop staring.”

Dimitri blinks and looks away. Back towards the fabric of mountains enswathed in snow and evergreen. “Sorry.”

Felix’s little hand catches in Dimitri’s mitten.

-

1180

Garreg Mach suffers a storm of frost, and in such a day the grounds are neigh deserted. Today is one such occasion, and many of the students opt to remain fireside, to watch the patterns of ice dance across the windowpanes and indulge in a mug of something spiced from the kitchens. Only Dimitri is out, for no better reason than to avoid the surplus congratulations of his fellow students, because such a thing grows tiresome when the voices at the back of his mind tell him that worthless little boys deserve no such kindness.

Indoors he is Prince Dimitri, the cautious and the kind, and the wrapped parcels passed his way reek of promises unfulfilled. Outside among the ice and biting cold that numbs his ears and face, he can merely _be_ —or not be at all.

He finds the training grounds perhaps on instinct, perhaps out of fatal curiosity.

Felix trains indefinitely, he’s learned, watching him now in the way Felix used to loathe being looked at back when he was different and Dimitri was different and for a shuddering breath everything felt as though it might turn out alright for them. But now all Dimitri knows of Felix are the wretched screams he makes on the field of battle as he has landed a finishing blow; bloodied footprints from the baths to his bedroom after another long session with his sword as testament to his overexertion.

And Felix knows what about Dimitri? That inside he feels a thing wretched and furred and hungry for the scent of blood. And perhaps in that capacity, Dimitri thinks hopefully, they understand one another.

Felix’s blade dances. Dimitri has envied Felix’s capacity for swordsmanship since they were young enough to blame it on Glenn’s obsessions and genes and the little boy who liked to learn dances because it taught him footwork his fencing lessons did not. Frost coats the training ground’s stone flooring. And Felix’s footwork has painted sweeping curves, lines, and little staccato marks across his canvas.

A beautiful birthday present if he’s had one, Dimitri thinks, before shutting away that thought because no longer are they friends and no longer can he look through the crystalline snow at Felix Fraldarius and think him _his_ in any form.

Felix’s scowl proves it. The latest flourishes of his blade are made with a particular ferocity. And when he glances towards Dimitri, those cat’s eyes pin him in place.

“What do you want?” Felix asks, in the cutting way he has that doesn’t feel like asking at all, and Dimitri’s fingers curl in on themselves. Would that a blade be between them. Would that Felix allow him train at the same time as Felix himself, that they might cross blades and finally take out some of the insurgent frustration in their stomachs.

 _To hide._ “To enjoy the snow.” Dimitri gestures at the frost that gathers around them, and his excuse comes out in a hot blast of steam. “It’s rather lovely this time of year. Don’t you think?”

“Makes me think of home.” Felix’s blade cuts through the air in a decisive motion. “Don’t want to think about home.”

“There are worse things to be reminded of.”

“Hardly,” Felix says, as though he is something one-dimensional that does not think about battlefields, as though Dimitri does not wake up to the sounds of Felix screaming from nightmares in the next room likely in the way that Felix awakens when Dimitri shouts from his own horrors that come to him in sleep. Because it comes with what they are: children raised on a battlefield, children baptized in hot, spilt blood. Try as they might, they cannot forget.

Felix gathers a cloth from his waistband and wipes the frost from his blade. Clouds of breath from his own arduous training surround him until he looks something as shimmering as he might have been that day a decade ago, when he’d visited to celebrate the Prince’s birthday. As though there’s not a maw between them, a maw that shouts _monster,_ a maw from which dead men climb to trail long, iced fingers along the back of Dimitri’s neck when he least suspects it.

“You do not wish to stay? I could train with you if you like,” Dimitri offers. Lamely. Anything to dawdle like that eight-year-old boy might do, shamelessly, for an ounce more of his dear friend’s attentions. As though within Dimitri’s husk, that boy still exists. Somewhere.

“I don’t make a habit of sparring with beasts.” Felix sneers something equally as frigid as the words. “Besides, I’d hate to serve you a defeat on your birthday.”

Dimitri watches Felix leave, until the iced fog obscures the telltale Fraldarius turquoise of his training jacket.

-

1185

The Boar supposes he knows cold only by the absence of warmth, and by the merciless, savage Goddess, it has been some time since he has registered that pleasant sensation. Now, he waits in the storm because in the storm he is not held hostage by accusation or guilt in the eyes of his ex-classmates. It is in the snapping scream of wind and ice that Dimitri understands peace.

As much as he might.

The passing of his birthday comes as many such thoughts do to the Boar; as a fleeting, disinteresting triviality. For five years he has watched his birthdays come and go and for five such years Dimitri has spun little importance into their happening. Now, the twentieth of the Ethereal Moon merely indicates another year in which he has failed to take the head of his sister from her shoulders, and for that he huddles in the storm and allows himself the loathing he has earned.

 _Vile,_ they sneer at him, the opaque husks that encircle the Boar’s wide shoulders. _Wicked thing._

The wind howls as the storm sears across Garreg Mach’s parapets, and Dimitri’s good eye stings as it is battered by shards of ice. A mass of cloudcover rolls in from the southern horizon.

The Boar’s nose flares. He can smell danger on the air.

 _It was on such a day as this that you were born,_ Lambert’s husk of a voice tells him. Dimitri looks into the bloodied eyes of his father. _We ignored the signs that bad luck was upon us, blissful. We did not have another._

“Quiet.” Dimitri’s fingers in his hair and pressing bloody marks into his flesh, vile, wretched beast, they should have taken him to the forest and left him to die.

 _There is another._ Patricia’s long hair was blood matted when she had died, an arrow through her neck, her spine at an odd angle, and she stands against the storm as though a natural part of it, as though she belongs. _The silver-haired southerner comes, and at long last the Blaiddyd name will fall._

“Quiet, please—” They’re not real, they’re not _real—_

“They’re not real.” Another voice, from behind him this time. Sharp and grating and too full of the licking fingers of fire to have come from one of the dead that encircle him, always encircle him. Felix’s, Dimitri knows even before turning to assess the danger in which he sits, a turquoise warrior through the cutting snow.

“You’re alone,” Felix snaps, as though Dimitri doesn’t know. Dimitri huffs a bestial assent.

And Felix’s fists are in Dimitri’s nape, and Dimitri is been slammed into the wall to his back.

Shock blasts through the fog of Dimitri’s thoughts even before he can register the pain of the crack of his skull on rock and the torture of his airways heaving through the constricting nape of his cloak held taut in Felix’s leather-gloved hands. And it is perhaps by surprise alone that he does not pull free, for he certainly could, he could pluck Felix’s little form off of the ground and throw him from the parapets with little more effort than it might take to toss a bag of oats. But Felix’s breath is hot in his face, rage etched into each premature line around his vicious eyes. Their gazes meet and the Boar sees all too clearly the furnace that swells in those amber shards.

And he realizes, in a moment of clarity, that he alone is not beseiged by loathing.

For Edelgard, and her syndicate of Dimitri’s foes. For the detestible way the world is knit. And beneath it all for himself, for this foul thing that was for eighteen years called man, for the beast that shies away from the light and quarrels with those who died long ago. For the thing that even now thinks Felix Fraldarius is even more lovely with rage contorting his face, because rage is any attention at all.

“Give him back.” Felix shoves Dimitri again against the wall. “Give us Dimitri back, you beast, you monster, can’t you see that he is needed here? Can’t you see we’ll die without him?”

“Felix.”

“Don’t beasts want to live?” Panic, now. It bubbles from Felix’s lips. “Don’t animals too need to live? Turn to Dimitri. Give way so that he might be brought back. Submit. We can’t do this alone.”

Oh. He’s terrified.

It’s etched into the lines on his face. It swims in his eyes. It shrieks from the gaunt lines of his cheekbones and the hollow sockets of his eyes and his frail, lackluster hair, this terror. Because they have fought and they have fought and they may just die.

Dimitri’s gut rolls, and again, and he is laughing, deep and wicked and cutting, laughing as the snow lashes them and Felix’s fingers tremble and he pleas for that which will never come.

“Weak,” Dimitri hisses, finally. As it subsides.

“What?”

“Weak,” Dimitri repeats, and Goddess but how good it feels to spit the venom he’d never allowed to stray behind their pearly enclosure of teeth. He looks closely at Felix—long haired, lean faced, war hollowed, and good, or else he would be beautiful and Dimitri would still be fucking yearning. “You’re weak, Felix, to need as you do, to plead as you are, you must be truly desperate—“

Horror sallows Felix’s face. His fingers slacken upon Dimitri’s collar. And Dimitri is dropped, shuddering in the cold of the same storm from which he was birthed.

“You’re hopeless, then.”

“And you’re pathetic.” Dimitri’s fingers itch in his gloves, voice just above the ragged howl of wind. His sneer is something of an animal. “You know—you must know—that I cannot change, for this is who I’ve always been. Or did you forget the times you reminded me of the boar I am?” The storm howls and screams, and they’re merely blurs in the gnawing cold. “Or did you come for a different reason, Felix? Hoping to wish me a happy birthday? Perhaps the last chance you’ll get? Perhaps you hope to be kind to me now lest you stew in some of that curdling guilt?”

“That’s enough!”

Felix charges Dimitri where he stands. This time, the decisive hand upon the hilt at his left hip is unmistakable.

He would kill Dimitri here for his uselessness.

Dimitri takes hold of Felixi’s wrists. With only the speed and strength of a monster, he throws Felix to the ground. Ice has amassed in inches upon the ground and he slides far down the pathway.

And Dimitri is on him.

“You called me boar, you called me beast,” he hisses. “You called me bloodthirsty. And that is what I became.”

“I never wanted—“ Felix gasps for air that will not take as his lungs regain momentum. He wrenches at the hand Dimitri has planted in the middle of his sternum, though it doesn’t give. “I never wanted this.”

“Didn’t you?” There’s a clarity with rage, Dimitri has found. Rage, violence, killing, it is momentum. It’s sitting in indecision that brings his thoughts out. It’s sitting in indecision when the ghosts come. He looks down and sees Felix entrapped.

Oh, it would be so easy.

“And to think I once found you beautiful,” says the Boar.

Weight on his hand, and Felix gasps in pain. An indignant tear drips down the side of his face.

 _Careful, Beast. There will be none of us left,_ says Glenn’s rattling voice even as Dimitri watches the pain blossom and spread. Felix who does not show what he is feeling on principle. Felix, who would conceal a broken bone merely because the greater terror is admitting he feels.

Dimitri eases off of Felix’s chest, and the latter springs away. Chest heaving, and fuscia in the face, he abandons Dimitri to his ghosts.

The southern winds assault Garreg Mach. Dimitri is a year older, and he is alone.

-

1187

The dying and spitting of the hearth invites the cold of a Faerghan winter storm, and soon not even the liquor and exhaustion will stave off the cold. As the hours wear on, the King and the Duke of Fraldrius will be forced to retreat into their individual rooms with merry, crackling hearths and bedsheets of elk fur and wool.

But for now, they work. They work in a manner more madness than method, with papers strewn across a scrubbed wooden table, ink and blotting paper scattered throughout. Dimitri’s writing covers some of the pages; maps, documents, court notation. On others, Felix’s sharp scrawl.

They work as they have for weeks, and presumably shall work for weeks longer. They work so hard that Felix’s animosity fades with his exhaustion, for they’ve learned the hard way—perhaps by watching their fathers and fates and perhaps just by watching themselves—that they will need to cling onto the other to make it at all in this world.

Cast into a future of darkness, without guidance, without experience. Together they and their friends have clambered to make something of this new, frightening world. And though Dimitri and Felix have hardly exchanged personable words, they have not exchanged antagonistic ones either, and the better for it. Dimitri has nothing left to say now that his beast has tasted retribution. He and Felix had watched the sky come down in ash. Had watched the world come apart.

And now, they work, and it is amiable, and for it Dimitri is blissfully glad.

The grandfather clock in the study’s corner strikes midnight, and it’s only then Felix moves. His quill taps the bottom of the well. He presses back his seat with a groan.

Dimitri looks up into the burn of Felix’s eyes on him.

“That’s enough,” Felix says.

“I am hardly tired, Felix.” And there is always more work to be done.

Felix shakes his head. “Sorry, but I won’t stand by helplessly while you torture yourself. Not tonight.”

It’s only then Dimitri realizes the day.

Time has blurred with the nation they’ve spun from this new, fragile thread. And before he has had the chance to understand it all, another year’s come to pass. And the King feels lighter than he has in many.

Perhaps its the absence of the grating nails of his demons in the tense flesh of his shoulders—not to say they’re gone, sometimes Dimitri thinks they’ll never be gone, but their torment has lessened, or perhaps Dimitri has gotten stronger. Perhaps it’s the weight of the world’s future borne no longer just by himself, but by Byleth, Sylvain, Ingrid, and Felix. The way the latter’s gaze tangles with Dimitri’s own over talks of peace. That the Duke is not as quick to look away.

That they can spend long nights entrenched together in politics and once more fight on the same side.

“It’s my birthday,” Dimitri says. Bewildered.

Felix leans across the glossy wooden table. The weaning firelight paints a vicious strip up his angular face. His raven’s hair is set aflame. His eyes hunger and burn as they always do; Felix in his own right, a thing unquenchable and determined and so very _certain._

His fingers tangle in Dimitri’s.

This last gesture, increasing in frequency as well. The sensation of a fledgling, delicate secret spun between them both.

Sometimes, it’s soft, unthinking, an instinct. As boys they’d wandered the world with fingers laced, and as men it’s almost too easy to fall into old, reassuring habits. Sometimes it’s vicious, tight, demanding. On the nights where Lambert and Rodrigue shining with blood scream until Dimitri’s head rings, and Felix’s nails dig deep into his flesh, compelling his king to stay human, to stay with him. Tonight, it’s somewhere in between. Dimitri’s fingers are crushed to the table beneath Felix’s sturdy weight.

“I’ll accept that as a wish for a happy one,” Dimitri says, grinning.

Felix clicks his tongue. “If you must.”

But he hasn’t called Dimitri _Boar_ in nearly two years, and that is enough.

-

1190

Dimitri knows himself to have traveled to the lands of Fraldarius before, but he cannot seem to recall any such occasion. Perhaps when he was too young to note the stunning scenery, swaddled in the arms of his mother, when nothing beyond the lull in her voice was of any note. Perhaps when he was gripped by that bestial rage, a summer spent in bountiful evergreen forests so as not to be caught. So as not to be man at all.

The snow has just begun to fall. This year it is especially late, and the pathways are clear enough for easy travel. The King directs his steed down the pathways to the Fraldarius Keep beyond.

A castle in its own right, surrounded by the grandeur of mountains on three sides of four. Steadfast and ever-readied. A crust of white marks her turrets.

 _I never made it back here,_ says the apparition of Glenn. He rides his horse beside Dimitri. He is younger now than Dimitri, than Felix. He will never know adulthood nor love nor the peace after war. _I never made it home because of you._

Dimitri ignores the itch of whispers and continues down the cobbled pathway. He nudges his horse forward.

He sees Felix in the scenery and smiles.

His party is little; his welcoming party even smaller. It is just one man; the Duke of Fraldarius himself, alone in a vast, coiling entryway of stone and wood and turquoise paint chipping from the dusting of snow. The Duke himself is clad in that same color. His hair, tied at the crown of his head, brushes the middle of his back.

Dimitri’s smile speaks to letters exchanged. Letters that had lengthened with each installment. Letters in which the trickier feelings could more succinctly be spelled. When one need not vocalize such hurt.

Letters that, when they’d resolved each issue, had turned to happier subjects.

“The King rides up on his birthday.” The edge has not left Felix’s tone, and for it Dimitri finds himself glad. “I see you are not the sort to sit on your throne and drink your wines and command your company come to you.”

“I’m still debating it,” Dimitri lies, and swings down from his horse. The mare whinnies and huffs; she will quite appreciate the Fraldarius stables.

She is taken by Dimitri’s servant, and his party clears. Eventually, they are left alone, two blue gemstones in the thickening snows of the twentieth of the Ethereal Moon.

In his last note, Dimitri had hoped to kiss Felix in a similar circumstance. Only then had Felix replied with his invitation.

A pretty blush creeps along the Duke’s hollow cheeks now, and Dimitri wonders if his thoughts, too, reside with that nervous letter.

“Shall we walk?” Dimitri asks, and gestures to the snow.

With time, they’ll touch on that matter too as best they can.

**Author's Note:**

> Say hi on [Twitter!](https://www.twitter.com/iliawrites)


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